By: Cameron MacKenzie
I'm losing my grip on technology. When my kids ask me for a new video game I have to google it to see how it works, and I still don't understand it. Does this game let my six-year-old talk to random people online? Does it have its own currency? Is that somehow convertible to actual money or will it eventually turn into crypto? I'm becoming knowledgeable about things that I don't care about, and that new knowledge is crowding out the other stuff I'm currently struggling to hold onto.
There will come a day–and it's getting closer–when I will no longer update my technology. I will settle in with my Macbook and my Roku and refuse to change, even though I probably still won't be able to watch NFL games without rabbit ears. When I'm in the nursing home my kids will look at me and say, "When he was a kid they didn't even have cordless phones. Can you imagine the changes he's seen in his lifetime?"
My great-grandmother, Mabel Swank, was born in West Virginia in 1902. Her husband was one of the first men in the county with a car and she taught herself how to drive, but she did not teach herself how to back up. And so, Mabel refused to park unless she could pull-through, which worked just fine, until one day her husband forgot to back into the garage. Well Mabel had to get groceries, dammit, so she ended up backing the thing over an embankment and down into the neighbor's yard. Everyone thought that was hilarious, except her.
Mabel decided, that day, that she would never drive again. That's what she told everyone, and that's what she did. She had reached her limit. She lived until 1989, just in time for cordless phones, and she didn't once get behind the wheel of a car until she died. Mabel lived through a change from horse-and-buggies to PCs, and she checked out on technology around 1945. I used to laugh at that story. I laugh a little less now.
When I watch how my kids navigate their various online universes and how they manipulate code in their classes, it makes me think that the level of technology I'm comfortable with could be rapidly coming to a close. This current level of tech is, of course, an enormous leap forward from my dad's first Magnavox computer, where you had to key in everything with DOS and carry around a pack of floppies to play Myst.
Today, tech is touch and go. It's simple, and it's intuitive. But intuitive for who? For the people that built all this stuff in the first place–my dad's generation. When I watch my kids on their gadgets, the operating system is far from intuitive for me; it's more fragmented, specialized, decentralized. And for my kids and their friends, knowledge of these obscure systems is quite literally the coin of the realm. If you know how to work the set-up, you're cooler than the next guy. If you've taken the time to understand how the OS functions, you gain respect. And when you're in third grade, respect is pretty dang cool.
I might be content with my YouTube until I keel over into the pool, but if the future looks anything like my kids' present, we might be in for a very different experience with technology in the next few years, one in which the behemoths who run things today are outpaced by open-sourced tinkering, and the internet that currently feels like a firehose of listicles and advertising is circumvented completely by kids who keep their information to themselves, maybe even carry it around in their pockets.
That might sound too sci-fi, or dystopian, or naive, but when I have to buy rabbit ears for my TV so I can still watch the Ravens on Sunday, it's worth asking how far this generation has really come, and why the next step "forward" has started to look like ten steps back.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.